However, one of my latest ‘discoveries’ is sludge metal, and will distract me. This discovery beeing Armed For Apocalypse a four-piece from with an ex-Will Haven member hailing from “tropic-for-my-standards” California.

Why this album “Defeat” ? Because it isn’t simply Sludge metal, the opening track “We Fell From The Bottom“ a great example of whats to come on the rest of the album, starts out with dark, slow and heavy riffing you’ll find on a doom-sludge metal record, supporting a range of gritty growls and grunts. Nothing special, until the end of the track, where after slowing down till a snails pace it suddenly pick ups the pace a many notches and transforms into metalcore riffing. Simply ace!

And it even gets better! the other 7 songs on this debut album, are switching back and forth between sludge, metalcore and even more techy riffs. Vocally it’s all over the place, more grunting, more growling, influences of “mathcore” and harmonies.

Think of this band as a mish-mash of Down, Shrinebuilder, Will Haven, Lamb Of God and Baroness. And it just works… all the pieces just simply fall into place.

Now as I had other albums to listen to at that time I’ve kinda forgotten I had it. Recently China and metal came up in a convo again and I illustrated the existence of Chinese metal with the band Ego Fall and Tang Dynasty. Listening again to Ego Fall‘s debut album The Spirit Of Mongolia I fell in love with it once again.

I’ll get rid of my negative points right away, these are the mixing, the sound lacks some body. And the other beeing I can’t really understand a word of it.

It’s hard to put a genre-tag on this band, or album. It has a lot of variation ranging from a nearly powerballad to some real belters, and many influences and elements. Vocals range from grunts to screams, alternating with different clean songlines and … mongolian throat singing. Yes throat singing! At first, I thought this to be just a gimmick of the title track,  but listening to the whole album the vocal style reappears if far less dominantly.

As guitars go, it’s somewhere between metalcore and melodic death metal. If I do compare it to a band, I’d say its a chinese Sonic Syndicate, or Dead By April. Melodic and alternating palmuted riffs combine with a great range of synth effects that reminds sometimes of In Flames and the other times of Black Comedy. And here and there Chinese instruments and sounds that almost make it sound like a folk band.

All in all it’s a great album, for me it put China on the metal-map of the world. If it get’s remastered, it might even knock some of the refered bands down my top-whatever charts.

Ego Fall on Last.fm

First something about the venue Entrepot, quite simply the nicest venue I’ve been to for a metal gig. Two levels that both have a great view on the moderate sized stage.

Soon after I arrived and got myself some refreshment Deadlock kicked of the night, although I wasn’t impressed with them at first, once they were halfway through the second song Code Of Honor their sound and vocals got to a level I expected and like from this band. Deadlock is a five-piece featuring 2 vocalists, one female singing clean and a male growler that take turns. Something I can only cheer for, if done properly.  Although the growls were the least best I heard that night, great guitar parts and the girl did great and even held it together doing an a-capella outro. A nice feature was the started and ended with some electronic techno whatever.

In the same vain as Deadlock, we got greeted by Swashbuckle while a hip-hop song was playing. It’s for once quite simple to explain what this band is like. Imagine angry pirates doing thrash metal. None of that glam/power whatever Alestorm seem to be selling as pirate-metal but brutal and tight thrashmetal. This four-piece, Singer/Bassist, Backingvocals/Guitarist, drummer and a parrot were all dressed up as pirates with made the whole thing complete. This band is just a load of fun. However, their sound wasn’t that good at all, not compared to the other bands that night anyway. They seemed to be the only band without their own soundtech and roadie crew and maybe they just don’t care. But I’d have loved more definition coming from that guitar and bass.

Next, melodeath metallers Dark Tranquillity were up. As one of the pioneers of the Gothenburg metal genre it’s hard not to expect a tight and well performed set. I truly enjoyed DT, and I was quite suprised, impressed even with the vocals. They seemed even more harsh and brutal than on album. DT also played a tune from their upcoming album We Are The Void and it was possibly the best song I’ve heard that night.

I didn’t know too much about Heaven Shall Burn all I did have was a coversong they did on that Century Media covers album. Anyway, I soon got a great vibe from this band. They seemed to have a style and sound very alike the HxC scene we have here in Belgium more specifically the H8000 scene. I used to listen to nothing but these kind of hardcore/metalcore type bands so I’m quite glad I learned about Heaven Shall Burn. They announced somewhere in their set how much they loved playing for the scene where they got inspired by, mentioning bands such as Liar and Congress. The band I knew least about turned out to be the one I enjoyed most.

And lastly was it time for Caliban. I just said how I used to listen to nothing but hxc and metalcore, well Caliban was one of those bands. I admit I lost touch with the band when I turned to listening to many more different genres within metal. On the other hand, it turned out not to be such a bad thing after all. I only vaguely recognized one song but worst of all, they didn’t sound anything like how I came to love em. I still enjoy listening to the albums Vent and Shadow Hearts but I can’t say I liked them much on the Darkness Over Xmas tour.

All in all, it was a very good night out for me except for the looong walk home.

edit: some seem to have problems accessing this Roadrunner Player, so here’s the Youtube version instead:

Here’s a list of bands I truly enjoy and suggest you to have a listen to.

• myGRAIN: Melodic Death with some Cyber metal
• Black Comedy: Melodic Death + Cyber + Industrial
• Sybreed: Cyber + Industrial
• Sikth: Progressive Math(core)
• Periphery: Progressive Math(core)  + tech
• Animals as Leaders: Progressive + instrumental + experimental + math metal
• Hacride: Progressive Death + Tech metal
• Eths: Female Fronted Metalcore + Industrial

And offcourse the usual suspects such as Fear Factory, Gojira, Dedicted, Textures etc…

These are just a selection, look em up on Last.fm to find more of the likes of these.

Also worth noting; not so long ago the new band Arkaea released their debut album Locust, who you might ask? Well these lot are Fear Factory’s Christian and Raymond teamed up with Threat Signal‘s Jon Howard.

Not only is this good news because a band I love signed to a label with a lot of artists I like aswel, but it’s the first belgian band to sign to RR in 20 years. If you know me, chances are you’ve heard me complain on how little attention belgian acts get in the international metalscene. Yeah sure there are bands like Aborted who do well but that’s not exactly my cup of tea. Anyway hence why this news cheers me up as much, there might finally be a movement towards more attention to the .be metal scene as there are in my opinion enough bands that are more than worth it.

Spoil Engine myspace

But I had to hear more, so I got the  latest album of their called The Dream. I was expecting more of the same as the song that set me on this band. And I was getting  it,  I did enjoy the  first 5 songs but  the problem with more of the same is it doesn’t have the same  wow effect.

That is until track #6, Her Kiss which immediately reminded me of Lacuna Coil a powerhouse in the female fronted metal  movement.  Not only vocally but also instrumentally this tune sets a different tone. Especially near the end when one of the coolest female grunts I’ve heard in quite a while blast through my speakers and snaps my attention right back to this album.

The album continues with a combination of more  poppy You Always Believed, slower  ballad’s like In To The Light and the title-track  The Dream and  powerful grunt-ridden metal tracks such as the excellent The Great Divide.

I don’t believe in giving scores to albums,  my mood, other artists I currently listen to etc… all play a part in how much I like an album. Giving it a score  that I could totally disagree with when I hear this album again months or years later would just be wrong. I liked it, it’s  not going to end up in my  list of best albums ever, I’m not going to listen to it every day for weeks. But I’ll also not forget it and If I do, I’m sure on rediscovering it I’ll like it as much as I do now.

PJ,

myspace